Low Hanging Fruit

With the recent shooting in San Bernardino national attention has again returned to that eternal yin-yang conflict between the gun banners and the gun lovers. Or should I say those who promote “sensible gun laws” and those that do not believe their rights should be curtailed because of the actions of others. Truth be told the former believes “sensible” = “total ban”– because, obviously, making things illegal always eliminates the problem (cough, drug war, cough, prohibition). Banning all guns because of the senseless acts of a few crazed lunatics makes about as much sense as castrating all men because some have raped. The ban-wishers realize that a total ban is not feasible, so they couch their rhetoric in innocuous sounding terms like “sensible” and “common sense” when referring to proposed legislation. The only problem with these proposed laws (if you can actually manage to get any of them to divulge exactly what they might entail) is that not a single one of them would have stopped any of the mass shooting rampages in recent memory. Not. A. Single. One. Calls for background checks to include the presence of psychological issues don’t help if one has never done anything crazy before. Barring felons from obtaining a weapon don’t help if one has never been convicted of a crime. Waiting periods don’t help if one has owned a weapon for years and then commits an atrocity or simply “borrows” it from a family member. In short it is a human problem, not a gun problem. Humans can do anything at any time and as much as we might all wish it to be true (oh, please let there be a Santa Claus!) it is metaphysically impossible to predict the behavior of any one person so as to shut them down pre-crime style.

Now some may object at this point and point to a number of “peer” countries with draconian gun laws who have lower homicide rates than the US. What this simpleminded analysis leaves out is manifold. First of all the use of the arbitrary distinction “peer” is simply a ploy to omit countries with lower gun ownership than the US but with much higher gun deaths. One prominent example is Mexico. “Oh but that is left out because of the violence stemming from the drug war,” they will say. Oh really? That is interesting, because the US is currently involved in a massive drug war as well, so I suppose to be fair we should subtract those numbers out in the same way they deem it valid to leave Mexico out of the comparison. When you make that adjustment the estimates are that the US homicide rate drops precipitously from 4 per 100,000 down to as low as 1 per 100,000 – the same as all these other “peer” nations with their draconian laws. The other part of the analysis left out is a lot of these “peer” nations are extremely small, culturally homogeneous groups (e.g. Japan or Norway). If one were slice up the US the same way and break it down by state or city rather than as whole you find even without drug war adjustments the regional numbers are on par or lower than those very same “peer” nations. In other words 1% of US cities are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun violence.

If those that want to “do something” about gun violence are serious then they would be well advised to examine what factors are driving the violence in these cities. They are the low hanging fruit as it were since most gun deaths occur within their borders. Since most (Chicago, Detroit, etc) already have strict gun control laws, that is obviously not going to be a solution. To solve the problem one must understand the source of the problem. That source is overwhelmingly the drug war. It is not simply mere shoots out between gangs that factor in here but all the other social and economic factors that drive one toward violence when a prohibition is placed on some arbitrary article of commerce. Like a cancer the prohibition infects the community and destroys it from within. But it all starts with the prohibition. Remove the drain stopper that is prohibition and all the other violence inducing factors will drain away as well. Will this solve all instances of gun violence? No, but wouldn’t solving 75% or more be a glorious first step?

The constitution says we have a right to keep and bear arms. Changing that fact would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. The constitution does not say drugs are illegal. Its implementation was unconstitutional, thus its termination would likewise be constitutional. We can end the drug war tomorrow with the stroke of a pen. Why not take that easier path and achieve the greatest good? Or is it more about ideology than about actually saving human lives? Prohibition never solved anything.

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